


and I'm a goddamn coward, but again so are you

by prettybrilliantfunny



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 21:29:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/931290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettybrilliantfunny/pseuds/prettybrilliantfunny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t the first time he’d done it.  Packed a bag.</p>
<p>He’d just never let it stay packed this long.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>Raleigh and Chuck find a way to escape - even if just for the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and I'm a goddamn coward, but again so are you

* * *

 

It wasn’t the first time he’d done it.  Packed a bag.

He’d just never let it stay packed this long.

 

 

He’d come back from the kwoon, nerves frayed past bearing and began stuffing things into the bag.  They weren’t even logical – his favorite hat, a worn Vonnegut, three pens off the desk, Max’s toys – he’d just kept on filling until his hands ran out of things to do. Then he zipped it shut and sat on the bed, his arms folded over his bent knees, staring at it.

Chuck had never let it stay packed this long; never wanted so badly to heft it over his shoulder and walk out the door.  He missed dinner, a training session with Mako; he sat there well into the night.  No one would see him go.

No one would—

Chuck swore and stood up. 

He was being a fucking child.  If his old man saw him like this—

He pulled the zipper roughly, forcing his mind onto something grounding.  Like maths.  One of Max’s toys fell out and bounced onto the floor with a squeak.  He did long division in his head.

 

 

 

Not a minute later, however, Chuck was thoroughly startled when someone banged loudly on the door to his bunk.  It had to be near 1am, who the fu— 

“Hansen, open up,” came Raleigh’s voice through the steel of the door.  Then, because Chuck had stupidly forgotten to lock it, Raleigh opened the door anyway and stepped inside.  “You still alive--?”

“Christ, Becket,” Chuck exclaimed.  He tried to crowd the other Ranger out the door.  “Shove off.”

“Jesus calm down—“

But Raleigh’s eyes had caught on the duffle bag Chuck couldn’t quite hide with his body.  His gaze skirted cautiously to him.  “What are you doing, Chuck?”

“Baking,” he deadpanned.

Raleigh’s eyes crinkled a little around the edges; despite the sudden tension of the moment, he was amused.  “ _I’m_ the runner, remember?”

“Any tips?”  It was meant to be a joke, but it came out too abruptly, too close to serious.  Chuck clenched his jaw.

At this Raleigh sobered, but when he slipped past him and sat down on Chuck’s bed without so much as a by-your-leave there was still a sort of understanding in his eyes.  It was a testament to how far down the urge had worked that Chuck didn’t deck him for it.  Becket may have been a washed-up has-been, but it was Chuck who had found his courage failing.  He licked his lips.

“Nights like this—“ Chuck’s eyes cut anxiously away, hitting a point on the eastern wall.  Beyond it laid the Jaeger bays.  Striker Eureka.

“I’m scared.  Knowing how easy it’d be to run.”

It was a feeling Raleigh knew all too well; how there were days when the floor was treadmilling under your feet and every door stood open like an invitation.  How the quick-ache pressed at your back and standing still felt like a goddamn hurricane.

He hadn’t had the strength to resist the push without Yancy.  Maybe Chuck was right to call him a coward—the kid was a bitch, but he’d been standing in the maelstrom since he was sixteen, chasing his father’s shadow.

“There _is_ a way—just for a bit, we could...get away.“

Even as he said the words he wasn’t sure the plan would work; it was just an idea that had been hovering at the edges of his mind.  Ghosted over in the Drift by Mako, and then—respectfully—left alone. 

“What’re you on about, Becket?”

Raleigh turned towards him, and from this distance Chuck could see the dark circles mirroring his own.  “Do you trust me?”

Chuck sneered, scornfully.  “ _Oh yeah_ —I like having mates that take potshots at my face.”

“I didn’t ask if you liked me, Hansen.”

_Good_ , Chuck thought.  “What a fucking stupid question that’d be.”

Raleigh’s smile was strange—soft, like Chuck ha said something else entirely.  “An argument for a different time,” he deflected.  “C’mon.”

 

 

 

Wherever Chuck thought Raleigh was leading him—and he’d even gone so far as to imagine the helipad or the docks—he never would have guessed the Science Division.  Raleigh didn’t even hesitate strolling into Gottlieb’s and that nutjob Geiszler’s bifurcated lab with a less than enthusiastic Chuck a few paces behind.  He stopped dead however when the older Ranger began fiddling with wires and a truly concerning number of cables.

“The garbage Geiszler cobbled together?” Chuck exclaimed.  “Christ, Becket—have you been drinking kaiju piss?  The whole point is that I _don’t_ fancy dying, yeah?”

Raleigh rolled his eyes.  “Newt said it was only mild electrocution.”

“You’re taking a mickey, right – this isn’t _actually_ your plan, is it?”

“We might both be dead tomorrow,” shrugged Raleigh.  He began flipping switches.

“I’m not some jaeger groupie you’re trying to pull,” Chuck snapped irritably; though, he couldn’t say the thought hadn’t been on his own mind.  “A Drift.  You and me?”

“Yeah, and?”

“There’s no ruddy way it’ll work!”

Drift-compatibility wasn’t a science; no matter what bull they tried to sell the rookies at Academy.  It was primal, and it couldn’t be taught or built.  There was not a damn thing Chuck and Raleigh agreed on; in fact, he was feeling brilliantly hostile towards Gipsy’s pilot at the moment.  He’d give better than he got this go-around.

Then, after a strained moment; Raleigh’s scrutiny of him eased off, just enough to be sufferable, and Chuck was left feeling slightly off-kilter.

“…you’re not the only one who wants to run,” Raleigh finally said.  His admission was delivered with the stiffness of confession, but it was honest.  It was enough. 

Raleigh handed an absurd looking helmet to Chuck; hitting the side of the computer when it failed to recognize the connection right away.  Hardly the most reassuring sight. 

“Shite,” Chuck muttered under his breath—but fuck all if he was gonna let Becket make him into a coward.  “Alright, let’s give this fuck-up a go.”

 

 

 

 

This was _not_ Drifting.

 

It was falling from a hundred feet up and hitting the water like concrete.  Electric blue shattered around them.  It wasn’t a lightening flash; it was locked and racing all around them. 

Raleigh lost his footing and fell to his knees; he felt punctured.  Everything was bleeding out of him – Yancy, Mako, his own past; he didn’t see anything, the Drift-storm was going too fast, but he could feel their loss, their sharp slap against his skin.  He groped blindly for Chuck.

As though thinking it had summoned him, Chuck was there—still upright, but lost.  His mind, his father’s, spilled over, and it was beautiful and shocking.  Raleigh realized his mistake now: Chuck hadn’t been chasing Herc’s shadow at all.  For years, Chuck had been running after his mother’s ghost. 

Her face rushed to the forefront of the drift and Chuck’s knees began to buckle, but Raleigh pushed the memory down—covering it with ghosts of his own.  Yancy half-awake and stumbling out of his bunk. Yancy with his arm around Tendo, chatting up a blonde tech in the Shatterdome Mess.  Yancy laughing, pulling Raleigh into a headlock—

“For fuck’s sake, _Ra_ leigh.” Chuck had recovered. His eyes were Drift-blue and bright.  “Don’t strain something, ya bludger.”

Together, somehow – Raleigh had never been so precise – the memories of Yancy folded in on themselves; crisp military lines that slipped into the abstract of the Drift and went silent.  He’d never sat inside the Drift like this—like the bridge was a physical place where he could be kneeling, could watch the handshake outside himself play over like an old movie projector.  Touch Chuck.

“This was your master plan, was it?”  Chuck scoffed. “Surge us into vegetables?”

But when Raleigh looked at him, it was easy; like looking into still, clear waters.  They had drifted – or done whatever the hell this was – strung themselves like pearls in the space between, and Raleigh saw him both through and _in_ the Drift and finally – _finally_ – understood.  He licked his lips but the taste of Chuck’s adrenaline-thrill lingered in the back of Raleigh’s throat.  He didn’t know what this meant for compatibility, and neither, he sensed, did Chuck, but for once in his entire career as a Ranger... _it didn’t matter one goddamn bit._

Chuck felt the wave of his amazement, his quiet rebellion; knew Raleigh would reach for him before his calloused fingers closed around his arm.

_Chuck_ , Raleigh breathed.  And Chuck didn’t know if it was in his head or not; it had felt so close.  Chuck didn’t understand the sound of it, but the Drift went purple around the edges.  The hammering of his pulse, of Raleigh’s, echoed in and around and through them—a feedback loop ratcheting up the energy of whatever was coming next.

_Chase the RABIT with me._

He felt before he saw Raleigh moving deliberately out of synch, the edges of his image in the Drift going dizzyingly hazy.  Every Ranger instinct told him to pull back, to keep alignment at any cost, but Raleigh’s hand was on his arm and it was warm and terribly real in the strangeness of the in-between.  It was so, so easy to slip in after him.

 

 

 

For a moment, Chuck thought they’d really bought the farm with their rookie antics—there was nothing but the white-hot silence.  He wished he’d gotten the chance to rock Becket in the face first for killing them both.  But then the silence gave way to noise, and the bright light was just the sun beating fiercely down on them.

Them.

He spun, acutely aware of the absence of Raleigh’s touch, and knocked into someone.  The bloke was about his size, and the hands that caught him by the elbows spoke of civilian softness.  He blinked the sun from eyes, ready to tell the civvy to take his grab-hands out of his personal space, yeah? Only—

It was _Raleigh_.

The handshake was strong; he felt the warm roll of Raleigh’s laughter wash over him before the boyish grin even swept his face.  That was the rub, though – because it was and _wasn’t_ Raleigh looking up at him with annoying expectation.  He was younger than Chuck could recall having seen him—slighter, softer-edged; in fact, they seemed almost of an age.  Behind him a dented blue pickup sat idling.

“Welcome to my memories, Hansen.”

Chuck himself didn’t look any different – he was still wearing his Striker jacket, now making him increasingly uncomfortable under this sun, and his knuckles still had the familiar ache from meeting Raleigh’s jaw.  But Raleigh...

“You’ve completely shot the loop, mate,” he breathed; a raggedness in his voice.

A soft, hesitance touched over his nerves.  Raleigh.  Chuck glared at him, and buried their link in white noise.

Raleigh looked sheepish, but the overstep didn’t stop him from being insufferably pleased.  “I mean it’s no Paris, right—but it’s better than the Shatterdome.”

“Where _is_ here?” Chuck asked.

Raleigh scratched the back of his neck.  “Nebraska?” he laughed. “My grandparents had a farm out here.  Used to visit a lot.”

All Chuck could see was the road, stretching far and away into the distance and, on either side of it, rows and rows of corn.  His eyes swept back over to Raleigh.  “What are we doing here, Becket?”

“You’ll have to change,” Raleigh said instead.  "You look ridiculous."  It was his memory, so he’d changed automatically – slipping into the younger version of himself like pulling on an old coat; it would be harder for Chuck.

“Let go,” Raleigh instructed.  Chuck inhaled sharply.  Like it was that simple.  No two pilots had ever gone into the RABIT hole together—they had no idea what would happen.

“You’ll maroon us.”

That smile again—Chuck was quickly growing to hate Raleigh for it, no matter how bizarrely comforting it was.

“You’ll pull us back,” Raleigh said, “I know you will.” 

_You’re the best, Chuck_.  It cut through the broadcast of noise, and settled across Chuck’s chest like a life preserver.  _I trust you._

It was as simple as wishing.  He was standing on the dirt road in civvies and his favorite cap—an old, beatdown thing of Herc’s—and just like that, he seemed to click into place inside Raleigh’s memory.  He felt the breeze on his face, and the sun was warm and calming in a way it had no business being.  His thoughts sparked an answering flash of amusement from Raleigh, but stronger than that—deeper than the superficials they bandied (too) easily between one another—was the bone-seeping calm.  The feeling of peace—of blessed fucking _freedom_ —didn’t loop the way their anticipation had.  It flowed.

Chuck flicked up the brim of his hat to look at Raleigh, the other man’s hand lifted like an offering between them.  He took it—like they both knew he would.

 

 

 

They drove and drove and drove.  They cranked the windows full down, and Raleigh held loosely to the roof of the pickup while his other hand sat lazy on the wheel.  They were driving stupidly fast down nameless backroads kicking up gravel, but the wind was funneling sharp and wild through the cab and Chuck’s grin was fast and loose with their recklessness.  It was just a memory after all.  Just a dream.

“Is that the best you’ve got, Raleigh?” Chuck shouted to be heard over the engine and the wind.

Raleigh smirked, high on the lightness in his bones, the pull of his younger self; still so untested.  Here, at eighty miles an hour with Chuck beside him—Raleigh was limitless.

So he did what he never did when this memory was his present: he slammed on the brakes, pulled the e-brake and whipped the battered pickup into ninety degree drift.  Then he released everything and floored it, accelerating them straight into the cornfield.  Chuck whooped and Raleigh was lit up from the inside out.  Stalks whipped past them, crushed by the rampage of their truck and everything was blind greenness and the sweet-grass smell of the air.

They were just kids, reckless and laughing.

 

 

 

He didn’t even have to think about how – he just did it: pulling them from the ravaged cornfield like taffy; absolutely secure in his ability for no other reason than because Raleigh had said he could.  They seeped back into the bodies they’d had in the in-between – bomber jacket, Raleigh’s lumpy sweater.  Raleigh began to settle himself, but Chuck had other ideas. Using the familiarity of the Drift as a stopover, he called up a RABIT of his own.

They were alone in the blue quiet, and the next moment Chuck’s memory was brushing the corners of his mind _like he’d drawn it from a deck of cards_.  He didn’t know who thought it, but he had more control than Raleigh.  The RABIT waited to be chased, and Chuck waited for Raleigh.  He grabbed his hand impulsively—instinctively—and instead of slipping in the other’s wake; Chuck held fast and they faded away together.

 

 

 

“How’s paradise look, mate?”

The waves were cresting and free of kaiju blue. The shore was peppered with swimmers and each perfect wave was topped by a surfer, slick boards winking in the sunlight.  It’s how he knew the memory was an old one.

“You’ve done something,” Raleigh said, wondrously inarticulate.

“Sharp tack, you are,” Chuck snarked, but there was no real heat behind it.  Raleigh could feel his smugness; tinged with something he couldn’t quite name.  “10 kills, you know.  I’ve logged a lotta drift time.”

The implication snagged on Raleigh’s suspicion and he looked away from the beach to study Chuck.  He looked the same as he did in the Drift, save for the clothes he was wearing, now more appropriate to the Australian beachside. 

“How old should you be?” Raleigh asked.

“Nine.”  Chuck smirked, looking out over the sand.  “Little sprog didn’t know how good he had it.”

And there it was again, beneath the smirk and the douchey sunglasses—that same warm tinge.  Only now Raleigh knew what it was—it was pleasure.  Not at his own bypass of the Jaeger tech or his razor-tight control of the Drift, no.  He was pleased that _Raleigh_ had noticed.

Raleigh was not so experienced in his control, and Chuck’s face shuttered over; that same white noise filtering down the line again.  Raleigh didn’t know what he was supposed to do, so he did what he wanted to do and chuffed Chuck lightly on the chin.  “You’re such a little shit, you know?”

It’s harder for Raleigh, but he shifted into the memory with a concentrated effort; his concentrated face apparently being ridiculous enough to make Chuck laugh.  And then he felt for himself what it was like to fall seamlessly into someone else’s life.  It’s a rush of blood to the head that felt like a cross between the insane high of his first Jaeger drop and a toe-curling, mind-blowingly fantastic fuck. 

He came back to himself swaying, and Chuck’s ears were slightly pink.  The white noise didn’t come back. 

And because he’s an asshole, Raleigh pulled a matching set of sunglasses from his pocket and slid them over his eyes, grinning.  The elbow Chuck knocked into his ribs was absolutely worth it.

 

 

 

 

Raleigh had never been to a proper beach when he was a kid—they’d never really had the time.  Then the Kaiju came and they had other things to worry about.  Chuck grew up an hour inland and was never short on trips to the coast, but outside the clarity of the Drift the memories were blurred, faded by time.

Here though, everything was sharp and real—save for a strange hitch along Chuck’s skin, like a reaction to the memory he had altered.  He felt – almost – out of place.  Then Raleigh grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him into the surf, and he stopped feeling anything but the water and the sand between his toes.  Raleigh was making a right fool of himself and the memory settled back around Chuck, complete and entirely perfect.

Raleigh’s half-laugh, half-surprised cry turned Chuck around, and Max blundered through the tide and into Chuck’s legs. “Oi Handsome!” he exclaimed, and scooped up the dripping wet dog without a second thought.  He was all fawning puppy and rolls, lapping happily at Chuck’s hand as he muffed him fondly on the snout.  He pressed his mouth to the spot just above Max’s ears and was rewarded with a dopey howl and drool.

Unable to knock the grin from his face, Chuck started, “Can you believe it Ra—“

But at that moment, Raleigh, who’d been trying to kick up muck with his toes, was caught by an unexpected wave and knocked flat on his arse in the surf.  Chuck couldn’t help it: he burst out laughing.  Raleigh sat up sputtering; coughing horribly on the saltwater he’d accidentally swallowed.

“Well done, _Ra_ leigh,” Chuck drawled.  He knew full well that _this_ was going to be a frequently revisited memory the next time Raleigh started getting too big for his Conn-Pod.

That’s when Chuck saw the look in the other man’s eyes.  His hair was dripping down over his face and he looked comically defeated, but he knew what Raleigh was thinking the second he thought it.  He tried to backtrack, but he was up to his knees in water and going nowhere fast. 

“ _Not the dog, you bastard!_ ” Chuck shouted—right before Raleigh tackled him into the ocean.

 

 

 

 

It should have been hard to believe.  He had gone swimming in the Pacific with Max—a bully of a puppy like he’d almost forgotten—and he had Raleigh, who by rights had never stepped foot in Sydney – and it was real.  Realer than the Shatterdome had felt in months.

They’d been lying in the sun for what felt like hours—it seemed to have no intention of setting.  Max was asleep and snoring on Chuck’s stomach, drooling over his own paws.  He whuffled softly whenever Chuck scratched him absently behind the ears.  Chuck turned his head and squinted, his sunglasses lost somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific.

Raleigh was stretched out next to him, all wild limbs.  His clothes had dried rumpled and his shirt was rucked up on one side.  He had sand stuck to his cheek.

“Hey Becket…” Chuck prodded, surprising himself with a whisper.  “Raleigh.  _Raleigh._ ”

Raleigh came out of his doze, almost imperceptibly.  Chuck might have missed the short hitch in his breath or the way his eyelids fluttered, but he knew the moment he was awake by the sudden flood of _Raleigh_ into every corner of his mind.

“We have to go,” said Chuck, even though he didn’t want to.  Time worked differently in the Drift and just because no one had come looking for them yet didn’t mean they hadn’t spent locked in the Drift.

Raleigh’s eyes slid open.

They were bluer than Chuck had ever realized, the greyness that seemed to permeate everything in the Shatterdome had been burned away in the bright Australian sun.

“This was such a shit idea.”

Chuck pressed his hand to Max’s warm and breathing side and felt some part of the _Raleigh_ in his mind soften.  “Yeah,” he said, because they both knew it wasn’t.

Chuck closed his eyes; he wanted to remember every detail of this beach, of the cornfield blurring the green around them.  If he could hold onto the exhilarating realness of those memories, maybe— 

Maybe dying wouldn’t be so bad.

 

 

 

When he opened his eyes, Raleigh was there—looking back at him.  Faint static crackled between them, a weak mirror of Chuck’s practiced white noise, and he started to frown.  But he couldn’t orient his own thoughts much less Raleigh’s. 

The dumb bludger had sand in his hair. 

He also had no bloody idea of personal space.  He could see the freckles across the bridge of his nose.  Raleigh didn’t blink.

_Chuck---_

 

Chuck gasped as he pulled them out of the Drift.  He fumbled the helmet rigging off, swearing sluggishly when it zapped him.  He felt Raleigh jerk out a half second after him, but he refused to look; his palms felt like they’d closed around one of Striker’s circuits, and his arse was sore as wood from sitting on the lab floor for who knew how long.

“’Mild’ my arse,” he snapped—suddenly irritable, despite the lingering feel of sand against his feet.  He wondered if Raleigh could still smell the sea, then realized a second later that his head was his own again and his frown deepened.

“I can still smell it,” Raleigh said—so abruptly that Chuck couldn’t keep from looking at him.  He half-smiled at Chuck.  “That’s weird, right?”

Chuck said nothing.  He’d heard of pilots ghost-drifting, sometimes sharing snatches of dreams, finishing each others sentences, things like that.  It was rare though—most pilots didn’t run together long enough for the Drift to seep through.  _There was no way Raleigh fucking Becket could be in his head._

Raleigh’s head cocked, considering; then his sharp gaze zeroed in on Chuck.  “You’re not still in my head are you?” he demanded.

Chuck’s stomach bottomed out; he reached for Max before remembering where he was.  “We shouldn’t have done that,” he breathed.

“What?” exclaimed Raleigh, taken-aback.  He straightened defensively.

“I’m fucking serious, Becket,” Chuck threw back; he had found his voice again and it was full of heat.  They were both glaring, phantom flashes in the back of Chuck’s brain; it was hard to know who was angrier.  “We should not have bloody done that.”

“God you’re so full of shit,” Raleigh growled and grabbed a fistful of Chuck’s shirt.  Chuck drew back his fist, to punch him first—and then Raleigh kissed him.

Chuck shoved him but somehow ended up with his fingers knotted in that stupid sweater trying to devour Raleigh through his mouth.  And Raleigh let him, opened himself up for the taking.  He had to throw out his free hand for balance when Chuck hauled him bodily on top of him, nearly knocking them both over, and then he was locked around him.  They crashed into each other with a ferocity that was rough and frightening and brilliant; _like wave_ s.

They crashed like waves and it didn’t matter who thought it, because Chuck could taste salt.  He moaned, too lost to be ashamed, and tried to lick the sea from Raleigh’s mouth.

Raleigh surged against him, one hand planing up Chuck’s back and the other clutching at the short strands of his hair, pulling hard with every press of Chuck’s tongue.  He wanted to see stars like this when he died.  Then Raleigh’s rough hand found its way under Chuck’s shirt and the press of skin against skin was too much; he dragged himself away, Raleigh’s mouth catching across his jaw like sparks.

“Why—what’re you doing?” Chuck growled against his lips, catching the bottom one between his teeth.  Because he could.

Raleigh hummed, his thumb pressed to the slant of Chuck’s hip.  “ _Drifting._ ” 

Chuck slid his own thumb over Raleigh’s mouth; because that was a stupid thing to say.  If he kept saying stupid things like that Chuck was going to have to fuck him right there on the lab floor.  Raleigh’s blue eyes danced and Chuck cursed—but then Raleigh nipped at the press of his finger and, Christ, that was worse.

He could have this, he thought.  He wouldn’t run, and he might well die – but he could still have this one selfish thing.

“We could be dead tomorrow,” Chuck ventured, pressing forward without subtlety.

But Raleigh stiffened.  “We could have died today,” he replied, parodying Chuck’s earlier concern with an edge.  Chuck couldn’t name it, but he knew intuitively how to respond.

“Seems like you’re involved either way, Becket.” 

He said it lightly; forcing back the uncertainty, the fear.  Raleigh found it anyway – splayed his fingers across the heat of Chuck’s back, and _smiled._

Chuck glared back half-heartedly and flicked Raleigh pointedly in the chest.

“Try not to muck it up.”


End file.
